Yesterday we left C. S. Lewis an atheist, as he made clear in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves. 15 years later he wrote the same friend, "Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things' . . . namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection." This change was not a Damascus Road experience; it took Lewis all of those 15 years to change his mind.

His earliest faith was legalism, reinforced by his disastrous first schooling. He then came under the influence of the atheist W. T. Kirkpatrick, a brilliant scholar and teacher. Kirkpatrick moved Lewis toward materialism and existentialism. Lewis came to believe that religion is not a claim to truth but an expression of psychological needs and cultural values, nothing more.

But he never forgot the joy of myth and story which he had discovered as a child with his brother. He later looked back on this period of his life as a nearly unendurable paradox: "Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless."

As a young Oxford scholar, Lewis moved to the philosophy of Idealism. This is a Platonic view of life which sees the world of the senses as appearance, and ultimate reality as a trans-empirical Absolute. Over time he came to see that the joy he sought in life points to a reality deeper than itself, that this world is a means to a more significant end. He then encountered the writings of G. K. Chesterton and was impressed by the way he made the Christian faith so sensible and honest.

In time he began to experience this Absolute as something or Someone more personal than an idea. In the chapter in Surprised by Joy titled "Checkmate," he tells the story. Riding on a bus in Oxford in 1929, the pivotal moment came:

"I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. . . . Then came the repercussion on the imaginary level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back--drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling." What came next? Let's see tomorrow.

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